Drry vs GoHighLevel
A warmer home for your community, without the cut.
GoHighLevel is a powerful CRM and marketing suite designed and priced for agencies that resell it to clients. Drry is for one coach: your community, courses, funnels, and email in one simple branded space, with a free plan and no learning curve measured in weeks.
Drry vs GoHighLevel, the full picture
| Drry | GoHighLevel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | Free trial only, no free plan. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | Depends on your setup: connect your own processor and there is typically no platform cut, but fees vary by plan and payment option. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Membership features cover courses and community, but they sit inside an agency toolbox, not one warm member home. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Between the blog, the funnel builder, and the membership courses you can assemble something like this, forms and calls to action included. Assembling is the word: there is no ready-made step-by-step format with a supplies list, quantities, and check-off, and no member-facing guides tab that simply works out of the box. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | Yes, a powerful funnel and page builder, one tool among many in a large CRM suite. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Custom domains and full white label, because reselling the platform to clients is the business model. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Deep CRM pipelines and campaign reporting, built for tracking leads across client accounts, not a simple view of which members are engaged. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Agency-grade monthly pricing, no free plan. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Invoices, payment links, and document signing all exist in the toolbox, but you assemble the pieces yourself across a steep learning curve. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (free covers 100 sends a month, unlimited on paid). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Email, SMS, and workflow automation are all in and genuinely powerful, but sized for agencies running campaigns for clients. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, though it is an agency toolbox: powerful, and a lot to assemble before a single file is for sale. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Audio is a genuine lesson type inside a membership course, playback speed included, which is more than most of this list manages. What it is not is a standalone audio library, and the RSS it does have feeds blogs, emails, and social posts, not a private podcast feed for your members. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Calendars, appointment booking, and round-robin team scheduling are all in the toolbox and genuinely powerful, more than Drry's booking does, built for agency sales teams: a lot to assemble, and no free plan. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Conversations are a CRM inbox built for chasing leads across channels, and it is powerful at that. It is not members messaging each other inside a community, and it arrives with agency pricing and a build-out before anyone can say hello. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Contact records can total what someone spent, once you have wired the pipelines and the products up to produce that. Drry needs no wiring: the payments happened here, so a member's lifetime figure, every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled, is already on their row, on every plan. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Membership courses exist inside the toolbox, and so does the assembly. Drry's release scheduling, prerequisites, and graded quizzes are free on every plan, work out of the box, and are enforced on the server. |
Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.
Moving off GoHighLevel is easier than staying.
Keep your margin
On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.
One tool, not five
Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.
You own the rails
Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.
Why creators pick Drry
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (100 sends a month free, unlimited on paid), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
Drry vs GoHighLevel, questions
Is Drry simpler than GoHighLevel?
Yes, by design. GoHighLevel is an agency suite with CRM pipelines, sub-accounts, and a steep learning curve. Drry is one coach's community, courses, funnels, and email in one place, and you can launch on the free plan in an afternoon.
Do I need a CRM to run a coaching community?
Usually not. If your business is a membership, what you need is to see who is showing up, who is drifting, and which content lands, and Drry includes that on the $29 Creator plan without pipeline management.
What do I give up moving from GoHighLevel to Drry?
Honestly: SMS, CRM pipelines, and agency sub-accounts. Drry does not try to be a client-management suite. What you get instead is your own community, courses, funnels, payments, and email in one branded space your members actually live in.
Does Drry take a cut of my payments?
No. Payments run through your own Stripe account and Drry takes 0% on every plan; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.
Try Drry free. Bring your people.
Spin up your branded space in minutes, courses and community together, and keep 100% of what your members pay you.